Waiting for Kaltura to gain some more polish

A) apparently anyone can add/edit the pages on Kaltura.org... which has already resulted in SPAM -- this practice sort of makes me feel like Kaltura is just letting the community fend for themselves. Write access should be limited and moderated, otherwise the entire site will eventually become overrun with "Candida" crap (look at the main "Documentation" page and you'll see several Spam pages right there)

B) Apparently Kaltura.org is the only source of documentation for the widgets that are available (including for the SaaS offering), but they are fairly skimpy, and some of the widgets have no documentation whatsoever. Part of the draw of the platform (a major part) is the widgets. You can't leave the documentation up to the community for these things and expect quality work to just appear. It would be one thing if you were purely open source, but for anyone kicking the tires in order to decide whether to use the SaaS offering or Enterprise offering, you really ought to complete your documentation and make it STELLAR, and make it READILY AVAILABLE...

C) To justify marking up the CDN services in excess of 500%, you really need to resolve A and B first...

A) Being open and visible is a part of our way. And so we believe that opening the forums and documentation to all registered users will allow all to participate, take action and learn together (a concept that has worked well in Wikipedia).
Even though the pages are open to all to edit and contribute, we make use of advanced spam control services and moderation tools based on Drupal, Mollom and our own as well as live moderators that maintain the pages and make sure the content is of high quality.

B) Being able to offer additional services for enterprise or hosted, does not change our view or believes. Most of the documentation are being written by Kaltura and being tested for quality assurance and accountability. The enterprise and SaaS (hosted) do get more services for support and assistance and that include additional resources of documentation, guidance, consulting, development and project management.
The community is the place to start with, supported by the wonderful community of developers that help maintain and contribute and Kaltura staff and core-team. If you are looking for additional services please contact us (http://corp.kaltura.com/about/contact), and if you are already a client please contact your project manager. - You are most welcome to send a direct email to me as well (zohar (dot) babin (at) kaltura (dot) com).

We are continuously improving and adding to the documentation, sdks and samples and searching for ways to improve both visibility and assistance. So the feedback of the community is highly appreciated and important to us.

Thank you for the reply Zohar. I really think Kaltura has great potential. We are currently in negotiations with your sales team to figure out a good package.

What troubles me, as outlined above, is that it's difficult to fully evaluate the platform first. If I go to brightcove, etc. (most of the competitors in this space) I can expect a 30 day trial period, where I'd have access to all functionality and extensive documentation. Granted, there are more expensive alternatives than Kaltura... but I hold firm that in order to justify the rates that you (or brightcove, etc..) are charging on top of the standard CDN prices, there has to be immense value that's apparent at the very top of the customer experience (that of course being the time period before a potential customer becomes a paying one).

When a prospective customer starts playing around with the trial offering, there should be no barriers to adoption. When that same person has to wade through a community run documentation wiki, that has Spam pages throughout (I see you have deleted those spam pages I mentioned), and when many of the non-spam pages are empty shells (Kaltura remix site, Advanced Editor, Simple Editor, KMC, the Javascript Client Library, KalturaLib, CVF, C# Client Library, etc, etc, etc...)... that completely detracts from the perception of "immense value" that should arguably be your #1 goal.

Telling a prospective customer that "there is better documentation available once you start paying us"... is well, Not Good.

This stuff should be front and center, as it will be your most valuable marketing asset to sell SaaS and Enterprise packages.

As we grow, both the community and the official documentation are getting better and more available.
True, you're right - as much as all the info and docs will be available it will help ppl advocate and get started with the platform and we invest more and more on these areas.

Kaltura understands that the integration is highly important and that adoption should be as smooth as possible - this is why even during evaluation phase you get a professional support and consulting and when you do sign up for an account you have a dedicated project manager to make sure you get what you need.
Also note that there are not many out there to provide the same set of features and support for the same prices (starting for a completely FREE package).
Also, being Open Source - you are free and welcome to try and use it all and have complete visibility to all projects sources and docs even before you initiate a conversation with a sales rep.

As per trial account - please use http://corp.kaltura.com/about/signup , this will provide you with a free account of Kaltura hosted, there you can check and try the management console, you have my email (and your sales rep) - so please contact us if you need any help or assistance in understanding the platform or with integration.

I hope you do evaluate and see the tremendous added value that we bring to the table and the dedicated support and attention we provide. Please use our support on the forums on kaltura.org or contact forms on kaltura.com or my email above / your sales rep email if you have any questions.

Thanks again for the reply, Zohar. I grabbed a 60 day trial of Flex Builder 3 and checked out the various SVN projects over the weekend as that is likely to be the quickest way at the moment for me to understand how to use, and customize, the widgets.

Like I said, I do think Kaltura has great potential, I would just like to see more quality documentation up front. I trust that your team is doing their best to correct that issue. For the promise of what your platform offers, it seems like a managed risk worth taking to go forward with a project with you (again, knowing that better documentation is on the way soon).

I agree with you that, for the value, your offering is more affordable than others. It would be so much more so if there already existed a full set of docs and examples for as many scenarios as you can imagine.

I will take the rest of my issues to my sales rep, or to you via direct email. Thank you for the responses, once again.

Sorry if this is been resolved off-list, but I too have complaints to off about the lack of integration documentation and relevant examples. Specifically the Adobe Flex API example. There's no list of the package imports so you have to figure these out yourself. Case in point is an object called "KalturaWidget." What in the heck is this thing and why doesn't the example show the code where this is obtained?? If someone could point me to a good location I'd be willing to do an extensive writeup to contribute to the solution rather than add to any existing complaints. Our institution wishes to explore the notion of a community-based video sharing platform for students and instructors. Self-hosted or not, there's got to be more than what shows up on the documentation page without any holes on how to approach certain things.